‘White people poorly covering black music must be stopped’: The dos and don’ts of the 2020 cover version

The cover has been a music industry staple forever. Whether Frank Sinatra and the Great American Songbook, Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” or Miley Cyrus’s take on “Zombie” by The Cranberries, countless musicians have offered their own interpretations of other people’s music, for money, to gain a following or as a means of appreciation. In Hollywood, remakes and reboots are the currency. To many people, these evidence the entertainment industry’s lack of originality. But over the past few years in music, and particularly in 2020, where musicians have found themselves with a considerable amount of free time on their hands, the cover song has been given a new lease of life. And musicians themselves, too.

For English folk artist Marika Hackman, who released a full album of low-key covers last month, it was a way of avoiding writer’s block caused by pandemic anxiety. “I didn’t want to stress myself out and flog a dead horse,” she says. “It’s a very different experience [to writing an original album], but it stopped me from doing nothing.” She chose songs by artists she admired, and was careful when it came to interpreting them, especially ones of completely different genres, such as the futuristic pop artist Grimes’s EDM scorcher “Realiti”. “I f***ing love that song but she’s a very different artist to me,” explains Hackman. “I wasn’t going to strip that back completely, because the production is a huge part of why that song slaps incredibly hard.”

Singer-songwriter and poet Arlo Parks, who releases her debut album Collapsed in Sunbeams in January, had a different kind of task on her hands when she covered “Creep” by Radiohead for the short film Shy Radicals. Of course, it’s been covered before – most famously by Prince at Coachella in 2008 – but the band’s notoriously fractious relationship with the song means any artist who tries it on for size is pitting themselves against Radiohead’s notoriously picky fanbase.

“I was quite afraid because it’s one where, if you do it wrong you’ll get ripped up,” Parks admits. “But that song was really important to me and a friend of mine who passed away when I was younger.” She performs the song as a barebones version, with stark, almost hesitant piano notes and her lilting, whispery vocals. “I really wanted to strip it back to the words,” she says. “For me, that’s the most important part of a song.”

Other artists, meanwhile, have found covers a useful way to usher in a new phase of their career. In the case of Miley Cyrus, the pop singer was encouraged to embrace her talents as a rocker after receiving a rapturous reception to her performance of “Zombie” by The Cranberries. She also performed several covers during her 2019 Glastonbury show, including Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters”, Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black”, and Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog”, but “Zombie” was the final flourish before the unveiling of her fully fledged rock persona on new album Plastic Hearts last week.

On many occasions, the success of a cover song has transcended the original. Take Amy Winehouse on “Valerie” by The Zutons, released on Mark Ronson’s covers album Versions in 2007. At the time, The Guardian predicted it would “survive the fad for retro covers” but said that, while Winehouse’s voice was beautiful, it was “Mark Ronson’s production, rooted in a heavy bassline and pounding drums, that brings Valerie to life”. The song hit No 2 on the UK singles chart and became one of the most successful singles of the year. Cover versions having greater success than the original can have an understandable impact on the songwriter’s ego, both good and bad: “I certainly have to try hard sometimes to not think about ‘Valerie’,” Zutons frontman Dave McCabe told The Independent in 2011. “The days it’s in my head are when I have to put down the guitar and just forget about writing.”

Dolly Parton certainly didn’t mind. The country music star’s 1974 hit “I Will Always Love You” gained fresh attention when Whitney Houston recorded it for the 1992 film “Bodyguard”. For Parton, being covered was both flattering and lucrative. “I thought it was the most unbelievable thing I’d ever heard,” the country music star says in her new Netflix documentary, Here I Am. “I’d never even have believed my little song could be done like that… People say, ‘[Houston] claims it’s her record,’ and I say, ‘Well it is her record. It’s my song, but it’s most definitely her record – it didn’t sound like that when I had it. She made me rich!”

It worked in both artists’ favour, too, when Johnny Cash covered “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails for his 2002 album, American IV: The Man Comes Around (the album included other covers, including “Personal Jesus” by Depeche Mode). “[Producer Rick Rubin] called me to ask how I’d feel if Johnny Cash covered ‘Hurt’,” NIN frontman Trent Reznor told The Sun in 2008. “I said I’d be very flattered but was given no indication it would actually be recorded.” After two weeks, Reznor received a CD in the post. “I listened to it and it was very strange. It was this other person inhabiting my most personal song. Hearing it was like someone kissing your girlfriend. It felt invasive.”

But in being covered, songs can take on new meaning. When Reznor saw director Mark Romanek’s video for the cover, which shows Cash performing it in the derelict House of Cash museum as framed photos of his late wife June look on, his opinion on the cover changed. “It really made me think about how powerful music is,” he said. Recorded at a time where Cash’s health was failing and his career was in decline, “Hurt” helped resurrect the outlaw countryman’s status as one of the all-time American greats.

For new musicians, covering a song by an established artist can provide a launchpad for their own careers. Reality TV contests such as Pop Idol, The X Factor and The Voice have achieved hits with contestants including Will Young (2002, “Evergreen” by Westlife), Leona Lewis (2007, “Run” by Snow Patrol) and Alexandra Burke (2008, “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen). Arguably this is what drove hordes of aspiring young singers to YouTube, using the platform to share their own covers in the hopes of achieving fame. You can still find the shaky footage of a pre-fame Justin Bieber performing Chris Brown’s “With You” from his family living room; other singers have made entire careers out of posting covers to YouTube. And having coverable songs has worked in the favour of artists like Ed Sheeran. In a 2015 Guardian article, songwriter Fiona Bevan said it was precisely the “copyable” nature of Sheeran’s songs that made him so appealing to the YouTube generation. “The songs are accessible to people to learn to play at home,” she said.

But artists can also find themselves in the firing line, accused of failing to respect the original song by removing all of the elements that made it great to begin with – and that’s certainly something that hasn’t changed since the dawn of the cover song. In 2017, producer Jonas Blue drew the ire of Tracy Chapman fans with his tropical house take on “Fast Car” featuring singer Dakota; even more so when he claimed his version “was meant to take over where Tracy Chapman left off”. Blue’s cover is bereft of emotion and oddly chirpy considering Chapman’s exquisite 1988 version hints at domestic abuse, along with addressing poverty and the futility of the American Dream. Despite this, it charted at the top of iTunes in more than 50 countries, and to date has been streamed almost a billion times on Spotify (vs 420 million for the original).

Britain’s Got Talent winner Calum Scott’s acoustic version of Robyn’s classic “Dancing on My Own” caused similar uproar, too, which he found surprising. “Everything was a bit of a shock to me – how well it did, and also the criticism I faced,” Scott told The Huffington Post in 2018. “And that’s fine, you know, music is art and art is there to be appreciated and criticised. [But] when people were saying, ‘You’ve ruined her song, it’s her song, how dare you!’, I was like, ‘Oh god, maybe I should have stayed in human resources!’”

Other artists, rather than either mimic or do a bog-standard “stripped back” version find success by being inventive. Doncaster-born pop-punk artist Yungblud, who releases his new album Weird! this week, used his recent BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge performance – which has been releasing compilations of its cover versions since 2006 – to successfully pay tribute to Taylor Swift and Avril Lavigne, with a string section-backed mashup of Swift’s “Cardigan” and Lavigne’s “I’m With You” that demonstrated his ear for production, while cleverly placing him in the lineage between the two.

“In my head I thought, ‘Cardigan’ is written in the time signature of 4/4, but I can make it 6/8 and it can fit with ‘I’m with You’,” he says. “So, I changed it around, cut the songs up and sat with my friend and made an arrangement of it. I just heard it in my head. It’s this weird party trick I’ve got, almost like a DJ way of thinking.”

Others attempting to cover Swift have received a more mixed reception. Ryan Adams notoriously covered her hit album 1989 (with public approval from Swift), to mixed reviews from critics: The Telegraph awarded it five stars, but Pitchfork, which had previously not reviewed any of Swift’s own albums, gave it a low 4.0 and suggested Adams had removed the vivacity from songs that had previously “crackled with life”. Pitchfork was itself subject to criticism, including in an article from Slate that pointed out the problem with a publication only reviewing a woman’s art when it was covered by a man – as if this somehow made it artistically worthy.

This discussion about the appropriateness of certain covers intensifies in cases of white men (and women) covering music by black artists, such as the proliferation of beige, acoustic takes on the music of Rihanna and Beyoncé that can be found on YouTube. Black musicians retaliated in 2016 on Twitter – after several white singers attempted to cover Beyonce’s “Formation” – with a string of trap covers of Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Queen and The Beatles. The result, aside from the hilarious outrage of Freddie Mercury fans to a trap cover of “We Will Rock You”, was a wider debate about the appropriation of black culture in music.

US pop band Muna covered Normani’s R&B hit “Motivation” in a Spotify session this year, and discussed these points beforehand. “I’m actually half black and I sang lead on this song, sort of as a duet with [bandmate] Katie and that was absolutely on purpose,” says band member Naomi McPherson. “It meant a lot to me and us to approach this cover and that issue sensitively. White people poorly covering black music is an epidemic that must be stopped. You can’t cover a black artist and not have that cover be excellent, so we just knew it had to be really good, or it would’ve been embarrassing as hell to drop it.” A marker that they pulled it off, Normani retweeted the cover herself: “It meant a lot to have that seal of approval,” McPherson says.

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Biffy Clyro fared less well with their Live Lounge take on Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B’s hyper-sexual song “WAP”, renamed “WAB” (“Wet as Biffy”). It was widely mocked – there were calls for Clyro to “be arrested” – but also criticised given this was a group of white men covering a track about female empowerment by two black women. Frontman Simon Neil defended it, calling the backlash “ridiculous”: “Who’s anyone to tell anyone else how to enjoy themselves? As long as you’re not hurting anyone, who cares?” he said. At least it did succeed in setting the internet alight for a day and distracting us from the pandemic.

Covers work best when the artist approaches the original with respect but simultaneously manages to put their own signature stamp on it – as opposed to approaching it like karaoke. Those are the ones that stand the test of time, from Nirvana doing David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World” to Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U”.

“I’m not trying to mark my territory all over other people’s songs,” Hackman says of her album. “It’s exciting to be able to have the opportunity to cover songs that you really, really do love. It’s a really joyful thing.”